Comment 41 for bug 442441

I also experienced this problem and also solved it by booting 2.6.31, but I have a few notes which might help other people solve this problem:

I updated my laptop this morning to 9.10. The update manager complaint about it being unable to install some packages, I didnt really read this, but apparantly this also included the 2.6.31, so I was still running the old kernel.

After reading this thread I installed 2.6.31. This did not work as I need the propertiary nvidia driver in X, this was not automatically installed so X failed to start. After this I installed the kernel headers. Somehow the nvidia driver automatically patched my kernel after this.

This solved my problem, i'm now able to boot X and use my touchpad once again. Hope this might help other solve their problem as i'm probably not the only one using the Nvidia driver.